Back in July, a
tweet from Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, foreshadowed his departure from Yahoo. This week he announced, via
another tweet, that he finally quit. Since his July tweet surfaced the same day Yahoo
announced the outsourcing of it's search techology to Microsoft, there's
speculation the deal was the main reason behind his departure.

The PHP founder is just one of the many high-profile engineers and developers that have left Yahoo recently. Lerdorf says he's "Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," but apparently he'd had enough. After 7 years working as an architecture engineer at Yahoo, Lerdorf says he's looking for something new.

In 1995, after building up a collection of C macros for web development, Lerdorf came up with PHP and authored the first two versions. Since then, PHP, which originally stands for "Personal HomePage", has become the most popular language and platform on the web. PHP skills are one of the
highest in demand.

Lerdorf participated in the development of later versions of PHP and continues to
blog about the subject. He frequently speaks at open source conferences and is a strong advocate for the open software philosophy.